Lucy Alibar: From Broke to Phenomenon

Lucy Alibar grew up in rural Florida, came to New York City, was embraced by the theater community, and settled down to the life of a classic starving artist. But then she cowrote a movie that's become a cultural wonder.

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Three years ago, Lucy Alibar was about to take the subway to the reading of a friend's play; Alibar was to play the role of a secretary named Ducky, who ends up getting killed. She was thinking about the character and the play, and she had no idea that the screenplay she'd cowritten—her first—had just been chosen for devel­opment by the Sundance Institute's Screenwriting Lab.

No one could call her with the exciting news because her phone service had been cut off two weeks earlier; she'd ­fallen too far behind with payments. In ­order to ­support her writing, ­Alibar had been leaving her ­Lower East Side apartment at 5 A.M. for a job making sandwiches and ­salads ("I can't ­remember the ­exact number, but it was a lot"), then return­ing to her apartment to write, then bartending, then home again to write, then waitressing.

But just before she headed for the subway, she ­finally got the good Sundance news, via an e-mail from her friend and cowriter, Benh Zeitlin, the film's prospective director. She soon scraped ­together enough money to get her phone ­service ­restored, ­rewrote (and rewrote and ­rewrote) the film, helped cast it, worked on more rewrites as it was being shot in ­Louisiana, and then learned last winter that it had been ­selected to be shown at the 2012 Cannes film ­festival.

This time, Alibar got the good news via a phone call. The not-quite-as-good news: Only the directors of the films chosen are flown to Cannes as a courtesy. As a mere ­writer (and sandwich maker/bartender/waitress), she would have to pay her own way if she wanted to go. She didn't have the money. So at the urging of theater friends, she posted an ad on the crowd-funding website ­Indiegogo.com. She had $875 in hand and had ­arranged for a place to stay; she needed another $669, and she offered everything from a hug ($10) to photos of sunsets from France ($25) to homemade gelato ($100). Within four hours, she had the money for her ticket.

In January, the movie that Alibar ­cowrote, Beasts of the Southern Wild, had won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah; at Cannes in May, where it was given a 15-minute standing ovation, it scored the Caméra d'Or prize for best first feature. Beasts went on to ­garner ecstatic critical reviews upon its June release and became a surprise ­indie summer ­visitor at multiplexes across America—the little art-house movie that could. In August, Oprah Winfrey raved about the film on her Super Soul Sunday television program; it had been recommended to her by President Obama.

It hasn't really sunk in yet," Alibar says. "That's probably for the best. I have to do stuff and walk around." She laughs—a wild, ferocious sound of glee—then ­catches herself and lowers her voice an ­octave, until it achieves an immensely self-­important mockumentary timbre.

"I have to be able to walk around!"

Alibar is 5'6", brown-eyed, size-2 tiny, beautiful (notwithstanding her self-­description as ­having a "flat face, kind of big frog hands"), and as fit as an otter. Now she poses on red carpets, pays an agent to sort through writing ­offers, runs three miles six days a week, and practices yoga almost ­every day. "Mostly I do Iyengar," she says. "I like anything that's hard enough to make me cry in class. I like to be pushed over my limit and broken down a little bit."

She likes Dolly Parton, Tony Kushner, Flannery O'Connor, and horror movies. She's an excellent baker and a middling cook. Her meals tend to taste like garlic and end up on the raw side. (She suspects it has something to do with understanding the concept of restriction—she says directors tend to be good cooks, writers good ­bakers.) She's working on an auto­biographical play about growing up in a Pente­costal Southern Baptist community with an ­atheist ­father and also on a ­"Southern-comedy action-­adventure" movie about a troop of Georgia ­Brownies. Her plays have been produced in South ­Africa, France, and the UK. She lives with her Brazilian film-editor boyfriend, whom she met on the set of Beasts of the Southern Wild and who was the captain of his ­country's ­national rugby team and also happens to be a trained chef (he made the gelato that helped fund her trip to Cannes).

"Yeah, he went to cooking school. He mentioned that to me, just offhand once, and I was like, What?!? It's like having your own live-in chef. It's like being a Park Avenue socialite!"

Alibar talks fast, in multiple octaves, and gesticulates with her hands (they're really not froglike) to great effect. In a span of 45 minutes, following a photo shoot in which she jumps, does headstands, adopts Tebows, and grins with what looks like authen­tic delight, she will reference Keanu Reeves, Dumbo the elephant, Odysseus, God, and backwoods killers.

The first story she remembers writing involved a gigantic dumb dog. "I was in third grade. Odysseus and his men, sailing homeward from the Trojan War, crash on this island, and there's a giant dog, and he's really sweet, and he plays with them, but he doesn't know how big he is. He slurps a couple of them to death. Then they make sails out of the dog's dandruff and escape. It was gross. I didn't think it was gross at the time. I thought it was sort of real. Because our dog at home had so much dandruff, I thought, If you had a lot of that stuff…."

The wild laughter again, then the faux–Important Television Announcer voice: "One writer's beginnings!"

Alibar grew up on the Florida pan­handle, near the Georgia border. Her father, Baya M. Harrison III, is a criminal ­defense attorney—"like ­Atticus Finch, but with a lot more ax murderers," she says. Her ­maternal grandmother, Alice, was a news­paper ­columnist, and her mother, ­Barbara, is an artist. She ­created her last name by combining their names and ­legally ­adopted it the day she turned 18, right ­after she got off her waitressing shift at the Village Inn on the Apalachee Parkway. ("I wasn't the best waitress in the world, but I was cheerful and worked hard," she told a reporter from the ­Tallahassee Democrat. "Most of the-customers were stoned, anyway, and only there for the all-you-can-eat pancakes. But I loved hearing them talk. I grew up sort of isolated in the country…so it was exciting being around that many people.")

"My grandmother and mom showed me how to be an artist, how to be a ­woman," Alibar says. "They both had families, these very happy lives, and they were both committed to their art, and it never seemed like a mystery to me how they did it. My grandmother had six kids—one died as an infant—and she was dirt-poor, and all her kids got an education. And my mom grew up poor. And they both worked so hard and cultivated so much of their own happiness. I wanted to have that like an amulet. Not like armor, but like a magic feather. Like Dumbo's magic feather."

Her mother encouraged Lucy to follow her imagination. Her grandmother told Lucy how talented she was. Her father was more complicated.

"Ever since I was a little kid, he would say [to Lucy and her two brothers], ­'All right, men, you're out in the woods,' and he would go through a scenario—'All right, men, you're walkin' along the road, and someone pulls up and jumps out of a car and points a gun at you, tells you to get in the car.' "

Her face collapses, contorts, reassem­bles itself; it's remarkably ­elastic. Her voice drops a few registers, takes on a deep-fried, honey-soaked twang—little ole Southern gal as Big Daddy. " 'What do you do, Boss? What do you do? Boss, you don't get in that car. You get in that car, you're dead, Boss! You take your chance and die on the road, Boss!' "

Alibar sits back, curls her legs underneath her. "My father couldn't really ­express himself with words all the time."

In her juvenile writing, Greek warriors gave way to men with muskets. "I would write ghost stories that never ended up anywhere. A girl goes into a house, and there are a bunch of dead Confederate soldiers trying to tell her something…but I never could figure out what they were saying."

She moved on to more naturalistic characters and settings, and when she was 14 she won a playwriting competition and got to attend Young Playwrights Inc. in Manhattan. There, she met a ­Jewish kid from Queens—Benh Zeitlin, the son of folklorists. "I remember there were a lot of drunks being existential in his stuff, and I wrote about a lot of Southern kids…and we ­became instant friends and made this immediate, wonderful artis­tic ­connection."

She came to New York City again in 2001 to study playwriting at New York University. She had never tasted ­Chinese food. She didn't have much money, but she had her writing, and her family, and her tight group of theater friends. Then, when she was in her early twenties, her ­father had ­quadruple-bypass heart surgery and a stroke, and she thought he was going to die. She realized that despite all the ­quizzes about what to do if a man with a gun stopped you and told you to get into his car in the woods, she had never ­really heard from—or talked to—her father about love.

So she wrote Juicy and Delicious, the one-act play that inspired Beasts. It was about a boy named Hushpuppy confronting the illness and death of his father, a man capable of enormous love but ­apparently ­incapable of putting that love into words.

She made Hushpuppy a boy instead of a girl because her feelings about the play's subject were so raw. She conjured a place where ancient beasts were rampant, lemons flew through the air, and feral children ate cat food.

And then her old pal Zeitlin saw the play and told her he ­wanted to turn it into a film. And then they got support from Sundance. The 11-year-old boy became a six-year-old girl (played by the incandescent Quvenzhané Wallis), Hushpuppy and her father ­became black, the ancient beasts became the movie's ­signature fantastical ­"aurochs," and Georgia turned into an impoverished Mississippi River Delta community in Louisiana.

People have responded to Beasts as a tale about environ­mental degradation, or race, or political anarchy. And all that's fine with Alibar—though none of it is what she intended with Juicy and Delicious.

"I'm just telling a story," she says. "It's about a little girl and her father. I just want people to engage. Because everybody has a dad, and everybody loses that dad, on some level."

Alibar says writing the play helped her understand her father—and her feelings for him—better. Watching the film she helped create, she says, helped her understand him even more.

"When I saw Dwight Henry's performance on the screen [as Hushpuppy's ­father], I for the first time really got his ­terror, even when he's at his worst ­moments, when he's angry. I got that it's ­because he's so afraid of leaving his child defenseless in the world. I love my father, and that's why I wrote this, and I really needed that to come through. I ­really needed his whole humanness to come through."

To listen to Alibar talk about her work is to watch someone wholly engaged in the process of learning through doing, ­exploring through expressing, finding novel insights emerging out of those ­already gotten down on paper. It's an exhilarating ­experience.

This alchemy of ideas also seems to ­inspire in Alibar a sense of mystery, even a sensibility of mysticism. "My dad doesn't like religion much," she observes, "but I grew up very close to the Baptist tradition. God isn't this distant thing. God is right here with you all the time. He's your buddy, and you can talk about everything. And writing this play and working on the film, seeing it, I felt God's presence. I just had more of a sense of my place in the whole scope of everything."

To Alibar's immense relief and delight, her father loved the movie. "He called me and said, 'This was the best day of my life. You stole a lot of my lines, but that's ­all right…. That Benh Zeitlin, he's a genius, Boss! He's a genius!' "

Alibar quit her day jobs last January. She writes full-time now.

When she feels distracted or is struggling, she goes for a run. Or to yoga. Or she bakes. Then she returns to her work.

When it's going well, she says, "It feels like—if I understood more about physics, I could talk about the theory of relativity—but I'm in my own world. I don't even see the keyboard. It's like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, when he says, 'I wish I could see what my hands are doing.' It's like heaven. I don't want to go on vacation. I don't want to buy clothes. I don't want to do anything. I just want to write."